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Bezos/Amazon: changes in the laws concerning mail order and paying taxes for items shipped from one state but being delivered in the other (there are 7000+ tax

Bezos/Amazon: changes in the laws concerning mail order and paying taxes for items shipped from one state but being delivered in the other (there are 7000+ taxing jurisdictions in the USA), which made it impossible for smaller businesses to remain compliant; thus forcing many to use Amazon as fulfillment; and Amazon gets a cut of all those sales. Probably close to $50 billion or more in tax abatements and other tax incentives over the years went to Amazon. The "OpEx vs CapEx" difference in tax laws, between running your own on-prem datacenter vs. putting the same services on AWS. And don't get me started on the difference between what Amazon pays the USPS vs. what other businesses have to pay... Google: should never have been allowed to acquire DoubleClick; clearly this consolidation of online ads resulted in a near-monopoly for Google. Google also "gave away" their Gmail service for a long time, destroying the many mail services that ISPs and others were doing as part of their offered services. This is akin to "dumping", since of course, there never was a way that a free service could make Google money. Google now reserves the right to build more information in their profiling of you, by scanning your emails. And they did a similar thing with Chrome, while paying Mozilla enough money to serve as a foil for Google to say that they were not monopolizing browsers. Now, they are pushing the "attestation" WEI stuff, since they have captured enough of the market.

discard_000001 3y ago
> Bezos/Amazon: changes in the laws concerning mail order and paying taxes for items shipped from one state but being delivered in the other (there are 7000+ taxing jurisdictions in the USA), which made it impossible for smaller businesses to remain compliant; While it is more of a nuisance to be compliant it is definitely not impossible or even very hard. For our small company's home rolled e-commerce system (long story) I researched and then implemented tax estimation, collection and reporting to accounting down to the zip+4 level in a week or two. It does involve buying a subscription to jurisdiction level tax data and ingesting it regularly, but I don't recall it being expensive. In addition, many states are part of a uniform system which makes the estimation easier.
u801e 3y ago
> Google also "gave away" their Gmail service for a long time, destroying the many mail services that ISPs and others were doing as part of their offered services. Back in 2000, I signed up for several web based email services including excite, yahoo, hotmail, and a few others I can't remember. This was well before gmail and none of them required me to have an invite to even sign up like gmail did. Other than hotmail, and yahoo, none of them are still around today despite the fact that they were giving away email services like gmail did a few years later.

discard_000001 3y ago

> Bezos/Amazon: changes in the laws concerning mail order and paying taxes for items shipped from one state but being delivered in the other (there are 7000+ taxing jurisdictions in the USA), which made it impossible for smaller businesses to remain compliant; While it is more of a nuisance to be compliant it is definitely not impossible or even very hard. For our small company's home rolled e-commerce system (long story) I researched and then implemented tax estimation, collection and reporting to accounting down to the zip+4 level in a week or two. It does involve buying a subscription to jurisdiction level tax data and ingesting it regularly, but I don't recall it being expensive. In addition, many states are part of a uniform system which makes the estimation easier.

u801e 3y ago

> Google also "gave away" their Gmail service for a long time, destroying the many mail services that ISPs and others were doing as part of their offered services. Back in 2000, I signed up for several web based email services including excite, yahoo, hotmail, and a few others I can't remember. This was well before gmail and none of them required me to have an invite to even sign up like gmail did. Other than hotmail, and yahoo, none of them are still around today despite the fact that they were giving away email services like gmail did a few years later.